How It All Began

Chaos theory—the notion that small occurrences can have immense consequences—underlies this story by the Booker Prize–winning author of Moon Tiger, deemed by many of us at Daedalus as "the perfect novel." When Charlotte Rainsford is accosted by a petty thief on a London street, the consequences ripple across the lives of her family, certain acquaintances, and complete strangers—a marriage unravels after an illicit love affair is revealed through an errant cell phone message; an elderly historian tries to recapture his youth with an ill-conceived idea for a TV miniseries; and a middle-aged central European immigrant learns to speak English and reinvents his life. Through a richly conceived and colorful cast of characters, Penelope Lively explores the role of chance in people's lives and illustrates how our paths can be altered irrevocably by someone we will never even meet.

"Writing with her usual poise and cutting cinematically from one character's story to another's, Lively elegantly orchestrates these events while using them as a setup for another series of developments…. As she's done in so many earlier books, Ms. Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit, and the result, here, is a Chekhovian tale that's entertaining, even funny on the surface, but ultimately melancholy in its awareness of time and lost opportunities, its characters' apprehension of mortality and the limits to their dreams."—NYTimes